IT has enabled exiting times for realty portals: Ganesh Vasudevan, CEO, Indiaproperty.com

The real estate market has been going through a tough time as sales have been poor for a couple of years and inventory is piling up. Industry participants are trying new ways to attract homebuyers. In an interview with ETCIO.com, Ganesh Vasudevan, CEO, Indiaproperty.com analyses how the trend of online realty sales is catching up and how technology is enabling the process.

Q. You have been in this business since 2006. How have you managed to beat competition, market conditions and stay relevant?

While Indiaproperty.com website was established in 2006, we truly focused on business from 2011-12. This was the time where we started focusing on property as a separate business that resulted in the formation of India Property as a standalone company.

In the overall real estate segment we have rental, buy and sell, commercial buy and sell etc. Our strategy was to focus on only one segment within the property landscape viz. residential buy and sell opportunity, and within residential buy and sell our target was on new property listings. We felt this was the sweetest spot in the entire market at that time.

We have built the most comprehensive platform for builders to market their properties on one site. For buyers, we put together an assisted paid search service that offers guidance in terms of project evaluation, locality etc. As a result we were able to quickly create relevance within the primary property (new property) marketing space. We had unique offers both on the marketing side (sellers) and services for buyers.

Q. What are some of the unique pain points for your business?

We help move the transaction to a logical closure. This is actually a true pain point for our business where the real issue is not in the discovery of property but more about fortifying that shortlist into a transaction, and finding all the answers to the questions that end up closing the transaction which includes legal services, home loans, etc. To address this we have created an online ecosystem that caters to all these requirements of buyers, and we handhold the buyer in each stage using our online tools.

We are also trying to get more builders use digital technologies and tools to drive more effective, high RoI marketing campaigns and build their brands effectively than traditional media.

Q. What kind of market presence do you hold in the online property space?

Our razor sharp focus on a particular business segment helped us build out a very relevant product offering both for the buyer and sellers. It also helped us to scale and grow really fast to the point that with a limited capital we are now close to being a leader in the industry from a revenue perspective.

We have grown 10-12 times in terms of revenue in the last three years. Most of our marketing spends has been tactical and primarily in the online space. Our traffic is around 2.5-3 million unique visitors every month. In terms of registered user growth, we keep adding close to 150000 unique new users on our platform. There are around 30,000 builders who are actively advertising to sell their projects. Of this, around 5000 are online and using paid campaigns, and of this 5000 around 4000 are with us. This category is still at sub 50 percent penetration and there is a lot of room for growth.

Q. What has been the role of technology in business success?

Property being a high investment and once in a life time decision, was never thought to be sold online. However, with the help of new technologies it is becoming a possibility for buyers to view the whole project online and in detail.

For example, with our TruView feature buyers can view projects via desktop or mobile in minute detail. They can have a look at the aerial view of the project to select and discover the tower, floor and even the unit of their choice via 3D Floor Plan and Virtual Tour. One can also get various other information like the direction facing, vaastu/ Feng-Shui compliance of the property, offers on booking, payment schedule, possession date etc.

We also launched an app with a mobile property search engine called Discover, which is an engine that analyses data from the user’s property search to display a personalized feed in a Google Now cards style. The cards included news about the real estate industry, price trends, reports, localities of interest and recommended properties.

All the 3D walkthroughs and visualization and gaming engines available on the website are also available on mobile. Once a builder comes on board for a project with us, we create a capsule for the project and it is deployable at multiple touch-points. We have created standalone kiosks where the same interactive walkthroughs can be deployed using WiFi or dongle which is connected to our servers.

IT has enabled us to provide property views that are detailed and someone sitting at home can now explore a property in detail.

Q. What are your future plans around IT? Also, by when do you plan to roll-out a mobile first CRM solution for property agents?

We are developing our mobile CRM in-house. It is in an advanced stage and we are testing out some final features. Some part of it is already available on the mobile app. We launched a mobile chat on real estate for the first time.

We also launched a feature on our mobile app called HomeView. It allows agents or sellers to shoot a professional video of a property using a mobile which then automatically stitches the video and uploads it in a neat professional playback.

Soon we plan to enhance our Discover platform. We have already deployed a machine learning algorithm, and have invested significantly in Hadoop for the analytics piece.

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